On Friday afternoons, we bring you the best of our blog and the best of the web. This week’s round-up includes an article from HOPE International’s Peter Greer, a lecture from Dr. Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute, and thoughts on Christian Libertarians from Joe Carter, Eric Teetsel, and Jacqueline Otto.

It’s not news: Getting a job is probably the most basic way to get out of poverty. That’s why I’m amazed by the fact that in Christianity Today’s list of top 10 poverty alleviation strategies, only one directly involves job creation (microfinance).

Christian libertarians do place high values on both individual liberty and individual virtue. They recognize the levels of order from individual governance to the authority of the state, though they would likely call the individual the “highest level of government” and the state the “lowest level of government.”

In critiquing libertarians (a favorite pastime of mine) I’m often unsure how to apply it fairly to Christian libertarians. The reason I struggle with addressing Christian libertarians is because I don’t really understand what it means to be a Christian libertarian.

We’ve devoted many words to this topic here at V&C, but my view is pretty straightforward: Christianity’s self-sacrificial love of neighbor is irreconcilable with the libertine ideal of radical individualism.

A number of my thoughtful, Christian friends have become (or nearly become) distributists as we have moved through college and into life. This is a sort of “third way” economic model advocated decades ago by G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, somewhat between capitalism and socialism but not yet mercantilism or the sort of gunked-up interventionist economy America has now. (I never thought I’d write sentences so laden with five-dollar terms—forgive me.)

Through the lens of the Cultural Mandate we will finally see our work as “the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.” (Dorothy Sayers, Unpopular Opinions)